Edge-guided depth map enhancement

Abstract

Low-cost depth sensing devices, such as Microsoft Kinect, can only produce noisy depth maps that are mis-aligned with color images, and even contain many holes. Even though the coupled high quality color images contain rich information which can be exploited to enhance the depth maps, the redundant color edges often introduce incorrect depth edges in the result depth map, since color images contain more textures than depth maps. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach which generates accurate color-consistent depth edges by employing both color and depth images. First, Edges of raw depth maps are extracted using image pyramid strategy. Then, the redundant edges in color images are removed according to the raw depth edges, and, accurate color-consistent depth edges are generated by combining raw depth edges with current color edges. Finally, constraints extracted from both raw depth and color images and the generated depth edges are fused in a MRF optimization framework to obtain the enhanced depth map, which is accurately aligned with coupled color image. As experimentally demonstrated, the proposed method achieves outstanding performance when compared with previous approaches.